Photography Center Leaving Midtown for the Bowery

The International Center of Photography, which is trying to redefine itself in an image-saturated digital era and attract a new generation of benefactors, has decided to buy a building on the Bowery near the New Museum and relocate there next year, after its longtime lease in Midtown ends.

The center opened its final exhibition, “Sebastião Salgado: Genesis,” last week in its space on 43rd Street at Avenue of the Americas. The crowd that packed the show’s opening often seemed less occupied with that Brazilian photographer’s giant images of the earth’s threatened landscapes than with the center’s own future, which has been in limbo since an announcement in March that it would leave its Midtown home but had not yet found a new one.

Widely regarded as one of the most innovative and experimental institutions for photography in the world, the center has struggled at times to attract visitors and financial support proportionate to its critical standing.

Mark Lubell, who took over as executive director last year, said that as the center faced leaving Midtown he and other officials had considered several possible new locations, among them Chelsea and some Brooklyn neighborhoods. (The center has operated rent-free for more than 20 years in a building owned by the Durst Organization, which now has new plans for the center’s space.)

But Mr. Lubell pushed for the Bowery, he said, partly because he felt that the center, which turned 40 this year, shared common interests with the New Museum, whose exhibitions often tack against prevailing art world trends. On Tuesday night the center’s board approved a plan to buy a building that it hopes to have ready for exhibitions by mid-2015 at the latest. Mr. Lubell declined to say how much would be spent on the new building or to provide the address, explaining that sensitive negotiations toward a contract were underway.

“This location provides a real frontage so that we can have a direct dialogue with the street, and that’s key to our mission going forward,” Mr. Lubell said. Regarding the neighborhood, he said: “There’s openness to experimentation and ideas in that part of town. Chelsea is a wonderful place, but it’s already done and established. We’d be following, and I don’t want to follow.”

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The center opened its final exhibition, “Sebastião Salgado: Genesis,” last week in its space on 43rd Street at Avenue of the Americas.CreditAndrew Renneisen/The New York Times

One goal of the move is to expand attendance, which averages about 165,000 visitors a year. Mr. Lubell said that though attendance should not be the sole indicator of an institution’s success, “I am looking for bigger numbers because I’m looking for engagement, and I want us to be relevant, and I think attendance can reflect that.”

The center’s school, whose lease adjacent to the center in Midtown continues through 2018, would stay put under the plan, but the hope is that it too would move downtown in the coming years to consolidate operations, Mr. Lubell said. The center’s collection, more than 150,000 images by some of the most groundbreaking photographers of the last century, will move from Midtown to Mana Contemporary, a vast storage facility and exhibition space in Jersey City, where the center will establish a media lab that will for the first time permit broad access to images by scholars, artists and the public.

The nonprofit center was founded in 1974 by the photographer Cornell Capa, brother of the pioneering war photographer Robert Capa, as a place to bring photojournalism and other socially concerned imagery to a larger audience and to focus on subjects too often ignored by art museums.

Exhibitions in recent years have focused on the Occupy movement, Hurricane Sandy, apartheid, the war in Iraq, Bruce Davidson’s photographs from the civil rights movement, Robert Capa’s rediscovered images from the Spanish Civil War and other sometimes tough subjects that hew close to the founding mission. But the center has also delved deeply into fashion photography, such work by Richard Avedon, and work that appeals more straightforwardly to art audiences, like that of Andre Kertesz, Helen Levitt, Andy Warhol and Annie Leibovitz.

Referring to photography as the language of modern history, Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times in 2012 that “no institution presents and parses that language with more skill and force than the International Center of Photography when in peak form.”

One person involved in the institution’s leadership, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the center’s deliberations, said the board had been debating for many months how best to broaden the center’s appeal without betraying its legacy. The motivation is partly because the center’s finances have never been robust and remain fragile, and it needs to attract patrons with deeper pockets, the person said.

Although there is no plan to move toward exhibitions designed primarily to draw crowds, the person said: “I think it’s about a balance. It’s not about going against the DNA of the institution, work that looks at war and politics. But at the same time you can’t always show just that. You have to show people enjoying life, too.”

Mr. Lubell, who was formerly the director of Magnum Photos, the cooperative agency for photographers, said that he planned to push the center’s programming much more aggressively into exploring how the web, smartphones and social media have revolutionized the way images are disseminated, consumed and function politically. “It’s the world we’re living in, and if I.C.P. is not right in the middle of that conversation,” he said, “then we’re in the wrong place.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Photography Center Leaving Midtown for the Bowery. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe